Sustainable Farming in India and Emerging Markets: Can AI-Powered Robots Be the Key?
The agriculture sector plays a crucial role in the Indian economy, contributing 17% to the national GDP and serving as the primary source of livelihood for 58% of the population. However, with an ever-growing population, there is a need to increase agricultural output sustainably to make it a viable profession for future generations. This can only be achieved through technological disruption, which has been slow to emerge historically, especially in India. However, the trend is changing, with agritech start-ups paving the way for modernization and innovation.
One such disruption is the use of AI robots in agriculture, which can revolutionize the industry. Farming is highly labour-intensive, with multiple time-bound tasks required for efficient output. Finding reliable labour to perform these tasks can be challenging. Crop robots have the potential to automate many of these repetitive tasks with precision, resulting in better output for farmers and saving resources, time, and effort. At Niqo Robotics, our mission is to build accessible and reliable robots that can automate laborious farming tasks that farmers struggle to perform optimally.
Traditionally, farmers rely on blanket spraying, which involves indiscriminately spraying chemicals on the entire field, resulting in tremendous wastage of water and chemicals. Niqo RoboSpray, our Spot Spraying Robot, equipped with cutting-edge computer vision and AI, sprays chemicals only on the plant and not wastefully on the soil, resulting in up to 60% savings in chemical input costs for farmers and preserving the nutritional value of their soil.
AgRobots have the potential to make farming more efficient and disrupt agriculture for the better. Robots fundamentally sense an input, compute the algorithm, and process the output. There are two schools of thought when it comes to AgRobots — autonomy and automation. Autonomy focuses on eliminating human intervention with applications in large farms such as fully autonomous tractors. Automation breaks down labour-intensive tasks into smaller tasks that can be automated for speed and efficiency to solve looming labour challenges, which farmers traditionally face in the seeding, nurture, and harvest stages of farming. At Niqo Robotics, we believe in automation before autonomy, as reliable and accessible AgRobots that automate tasks can make farming exponentially easier by reducing input time, effort, and costs.
Breakthrough innovations in AI have made the “compute” part of robots more powerful, enabling small-time models to be run on portable and dependable robots. While software is getting smarter, hardware is getting cheaper, which is the winning combination for agritech to scale.
2023 is a paramount year for agritech, as the sector has matured to the point where it is resolving problems faced by farmers at the ground level. Farmers are beginning to develop trust and have realistic expectations about agritech. They seek tech that delivers results, is robust to withstand field operations, and is accessible. Agritech companies that embrace a farmer-first approach will lead agriculture into its new era of super-efficient and sustainable farming.
